For a society whose sole ideological commitment is to liberalism and is affiliated with a liberal political party, I must say that we spend far less time that we ought to on articulating what this particular term actually means in practice.
I assume most of you will have a general idea of what liberalism broadly encompasses: liberty, personal freedoms, rights, private property, open and democratic institutions, government accountability, free and fair elections, etc. Yet establishing any further degree of precision without controversy proves difficult. Liberalism has amassed a vast number of interpretations over the centuries, distinguished by time and space. While most clearly differentiated between laissez-faire classical liberals and more interventionist modern liberals, this well-known fault line is far from alone in dividing liberal political theory into a number of sub-schools.
As a student of political philosophy, this ambiguity has been a source of particular grief. In order to differentiate between schools of political thought, it is necessary to separate persuasions into distinct categories for convenience. Creating such a model which holds any utility to the study of political ideas, however, is no pedestrian affair. A plausible typology of liberalism must include the wide spectrum of liberal theory from left to right, while also excluding figures better described as conservatives or socialists. And that is without mentioning whether libertarianism is best described as a form of ultra-liberalism or its own distinct thing.
I make no promises of resolving all of this ambiguity here. Rather, my ambition is to share the typology I have developed. I refrain from claiming my delineation of these ideologies as the only plausible way of engaging with the heterogeneity of liberalism. But I do personally find utility in looking at political thought this way, and hope you come to share this persuasion by the end of this article. To this end, I shall explore the history of liberal thought across a number of key domains – illuminating the fault lines necessary to articulate better what liberalism was and is today.
Liberty and Rights
Just from the name, it is evident that liberalism has a close connection to the value of liberty. Both classical and modern liberals place a great emphasis on liberty as central to making a political philosophy desirable. Where the two approaches diverge is in their conception of what our rights and entitlements are, for the discourse around which entities hold rights and what these rights are has morphed as liberalism developed. Classical liberal theory stressed: (1) that rights are derived in some way from a state of nature, and (2) that the individual is the entity which possesses these rights.
Such natural rights theories dominated liberal thought during 17th and 18th centuries. In his Two Treatise on Government, John Locke laid out an early articulation of rights and liberties which encompassed exactly this. Though not a self-identified liberal, and known mostly for his contributions to empiricist epistemology by academia until recent decades, Locke’s political philosophy has retroactively been situated as a genesis of sorts for liberal thought. While anachronistic, such a designation proves useful as Locke popularised several ideas which went on to shape classical liberalism.
From Locke, liberalism inherited a conception of rights and government by consent of the people. His second treatise articulated that every individual, “has a property in his own person,” and thus cannot be, “subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent”. Political philosophy would later develop this notion into the theory of self-ownership. The state, according to Locke, emerged by free agreement from the state of nature for the purpose of upholding the rights of individuals. This idea, falsely attributed to the Glorious Revolution despite Locke completing his second treatise prior to 1688, nevertheless helped to articulate the emerging concept of popular sovereignty which would later develop beyond a monarchical framing into our present conception of liberal democracy. Yet as liberalism developed during the 19th and especially the 20th century, the liberal understanding of rights began to shift. It became more broadly understood that values are subjective, not originating from any state of nature. Rather, societies construct their own values and preferences to a great degree. Consequently, natural law theory gave way for a different interpretation of our entitlements and persons: human rights.
This shift from individualistic natural rights to a more egalitarian conception of human rights took place over centuries. Thomas Paine, thought certainly a classical liberal, articulated a more egalitarian vision of what liberal rights entail under a republic. Challenging the legitimacy of aristocratic privilege, Paine championed the dignity of all persons as not just free but also equal. Such trends continued, and noticeably took off after the Second World War. Think of documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and European Convention on Human Rights, which were explicitly rooted in the context of the Holocaust and atrocities perpetrated by socialist states. This modern conception of human rights derives its legitimacy from a democratic mandate rather than the professed universality of Enlightenment values. Crucially, these human rights are often held by groups of individuals, marking a key break from classical liberal assumptions.
There was, of course, a degree of nuance in this shift from individual to human rights as the basis of liberal freedom. John Rawls, while interpretating his state of nature theory as a hypothetical rather than an actual historical event, nevertheless still ascribed, “the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others” to individuals. In this decision, Rawls was criticised by a number of liberal egalitarians who sought to introduce a conception of collective rights to liberal theories of justice as a means of combatting systemic prejudice against historically marginalised communities. Such an omission on the part of Rawls was particularly notable considering the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, right after the Civil Rights Movement and second-wave feminism took off. Contemporarily liberals have attempted to correct for this perceived deficiency by committing to collective rights of groups such as ethnic minorities and queer people.
What this reveals within liberal thought is dissent regarding how we ought to conceive of rights. Rights have been ascribed to both individuals and collectives, and rooted either in a historical state of nature or the social construction of values. On this basis, it is hard to define liberalism as a whole on the basis of its commitment to liberty and rights beyond stating that such a commitment exists; any further specification risks appealing to the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy by excluding interpretations of liberalism from our definition. For more precision, other aspects of liberal thought must be examined.
Economic Liberalism
With private property rights being a central tenet of liberalism’s platform, it is no surprise that liberalism developed a distinct economic component. Liberals of all stripes support a market economy with some conception of property rights. Historically, this has been a key divide between liberalism and other ideologies; conservatism was historically connected to economic protectionism, while socialism commits itself to the ability of private property. There are of course liberal conservatives and liberal socialists who bridge the gaps between these positions economically, especially with the rise of the New Right during the 20th century. In broad strokes, however, it remains helpful to view economic liberalism as differentiated from other approaches via its commitment to the free market and private property.
For this reason, liberalism has a strong connection to the capitalist mode of economic organisation. Such developments are often connected, for good reason, to the work of Adam Smith. The publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776 was a watershed moment both for the field of economics and for liberalism, as Smith defended the viability of what would become liberal economics. His systematised explanation of the market and incentives structures thereof offers an explanation for how societies become prosperous; his notion of the ‘invisible hand’ endorses laissez-faire economics as the harmonisation of the self-interested pursuit of accumulation and benefit to the community as a whole. Commercial capitalism, thus, offers both a system of economic liberty and broader societal prosperity.
With such scholarship taking place at the advent of the Industrial Revolution, it is no surprise that liberal economics changed with material conditions, for industrialisation presented just as many social challenges as opportunities. The liberal economists of the 19th century thus began to endorse a greater degree of redistribution in their theories, while attempting to harness the potential of the market and free trade. David Ricardo, John Stuart-Mill, Henry George, and Léon Walras all incorporated a critique of land monopolisation into their theories. Moreover, these left-liberal economists inspired liberal socialist economics predicated on the nationalisation of economic rent and greater workplace democracy, though crucially still operating in an otherwise free market.
The expansion of the scope of state bureaucracy into the 20th century further pushed liberal economics in the direction of regulation. At this point, liberals were advocating for a regulated market economy rather than the free market favoured by classical liberals. This shift was consolidated as a reaction to the Great Depression, where fiscal stimulus as a means of recovery from economic downturn represented a broader shift amongst liberals towards a Keynesian conception of economics. The necessity of such regulation was further consolidated by normative justifications around liberal egalitarianism, such as the democratic equality advanced by John Rawls. Crucially, Rawls argued that inequalities are only legitimate if they can, “reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage”.
This radical departure from a laissez-faire approach, which would come to be associated in contemporary politics with the New Right and libertarian movements, reveals the complexity of summarising liberal economics as a whole. This distinction between classical and modern liberalism spans across space as well as time. In Europe, economic liberalism is synonymous with the free market capitalism of classical liberalism. Yet curiously, liberal economics is more closely associated with regulated capitalism and welfare states advocated by modern liberals across the pond, likely due to the influence of Roosevelt’s New Deal in reshaping the American political landscape and party alignment. With few consistent elements uniting all liberal approaches to economics beyond vague commitments to property rights and a market economy, we still lack enough material to articulate just what liberalism truly is at its core.
The Liberal State
It is through the examination of liberal theories regarding the state which, in my opinion, best illuminates the essence of liberal thought relative to other political philosophies. Right from the start, the premise of liberalism has been the reconciliation of state authority with personal freedom, whether economic or social. Locke famously articulated that “where law ends, tyranny begins”, and viewed the social contract arising from the state of nature as a means to ensure the enforcement of natural law and protection of individual rights. While different strands of liberalism may dissent on the substance of what these rights are, they concur on the entitlement of persons to these rights and the role of the state in creating a well-ordered society with institutions capable of upholding them.
Not only does this idea unite different strands of liberalism, but it also helps to differentiate liberalism from libertarianism. Whereas the term liberal derives from a broader concept of liberty, libertarianism’s origin is more specific. Before its use as a political term, libertarianism was deployed in the metaphysical debate around the existence of free will. With connotations of unincumbered self-government, the first person to use ‘libertarian’ in a political context was no liberal. Rather, it was French anarchist and communist Joseph Déjacque in his open letter to the ‘grandfather of anarchism’ Pierre Joseph Proudhon.
Déjacque first deployed the term ‘libertarian’ to criticise Proudhon’s commitment to his own professed principles: “Moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian, you want free exchange of cotton and candles and you seek to protect man against woman in the exchange of affectional human passion. You cry against the great barons of capital, and you would rebuild a proud barony of man on vassal-woman”. From there, ‘libertarian’ was adopted by the broader anarchist movement to profess a commitment to personal freedom and anti-statism. It was not until the mid-20th century where this term was picked up by the right.
This origin of libertarianism is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the only self-professed libertarians for almost a century were socialists and communists, which clashes with the prevailing assumption that libertarianism refers to an inherently right-wing position. Secondly, libertarianism has always referred to a position fundamentally different than even classical liberalism. The key distinction between the two being that when push comes to shove, liberalism prioritised the legitimacy of the state over absolute freedom from interference. Libertarians, conversely, refuse to sacrifice any freedom to this end. If this commitment to freedom reduces the legitimate scope of the state substantially or even entirely, then so be it.
This becomes especially apparent when considering the divergence between liberals and libertarians on popular sovereignty. Though liberalism has a complicated relationship with the emergence of democratic republicanism following the French Revolution, liberals tend to view this system of government as at least passable. Democracy is, if not the best means of preserving a free society, at least better than other modes of government from the liberal perspective. Libertarians – conversely – have a long history of hostility to popular sovereignty, refusing to accept majority opinion as a legitimate basis for the use of state force. It therefore makes more sense to see libertarianism as an umbrella term for minarchists and anarchists, rather than synonymous with classical or neo-liberalism. Liberals believe that tyranny is the absence of law. Libertarians believe that tyranny is the imposition of law.
Conclusion
The definition of liberalism we have reached is that of an ideology concerned with social and economic liberty safeguarded by the state. Liberals disagree about what these liberties ought to be, how they are justified, and precisely what role the state should play in facilitating the conditions necessary for personal freedom. Alas, both classical and modern liberals concur that liberty is (1) a central value, (2) encompasses some conception of property rights, and (3) is compatible with the authority of a liberal state. Socialism and conservatism remain distinct due to their fundamental assumptions being different, while libertarianism shares liberal commitments bar those to the legitimacy of the state.
Of what relevance is this to contemporary politics? Our politics appear increasingly post-liberal in a number of key ways, not least the collapse of the traditional party system and rise of new populist alternatives. It remains crucial, however, to appreciate what liberalism really means. And not just for the purpose of studying history. Today’s climate may well be a reactionary one, defined by hostility to the liberal assumptions of established institutions. Alas, many remain committed to the preservation of British parliamentary democracy as it currently exists. It proves useful for liberals to understand what ideas they are defending, and for its opponents to know what they are struggling against.
Whatever side of these ideological fault lines you may be, we all have a responsibility to engage fairly with ideas from across the political spectrum. I hope, if nothing else, that my words have enabled you to make a more informed decision regarding the core debates which define liberal thought.